Peer-to-peer network location resolution is an emerging market within the wireless communication arena. New systems are being developed to find people and/or objects, in various environments. For outdoor environments, there are many solutions such as GPS that can provide reliable location estimates. In building location solutions, however, techniques are still being researched and developed. Many indoor location determination solutions operate on radio frequency signals and require a dense installation of receivers capable of measuring characteristics of the received waveforms that are used to determine the transmitter's location.
Wireless location determination or radiolocalization in Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) is an area receiving increasing attention. Accurate and cost-effective localization is a key application enabler for wireless sensor networks in a variety of applications such as warehousing and manufacturing logistics. Another typical application may be inventory management: An office has a collection of computers, printers, lab equipment, etc. and the office manager would like to know the location of this office equipment at all times. To date, this has been done with portal systems. Examples of wireless network technology that shows promise in addressing many of the shortcomings of current wireless PANs in terms of cost, throughput, and scalability include the 802.15.4/ZigBee standard, Bluetooth, such as Bluetooth 1.0B, and radiotransceivers and wireless sensor devices operable in these technologies.
Wireless sensor devices may often be highly resource constrained, however. Thus, while some devices of the network may have the ability to perform device location determination this may not be the case for a number of the devices of the wireless network. One of the shortcomings of the current wireless PAN solutions is their inability to provide low cost, transparent location determination for devices within the network. Ideally, each device within the network should have the ability to determine its connectivity status and physical location within the network without the use of specialized and expensive hardware and software. Ideally, location determination calculations could be performed without a corresponding reduction in data throughput between devices within the network.